China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795, Royal Academy, London
'The Chinese say that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two, all the world else is blind,' wrote the 17th-century scholar Robert Burton in his book The Anatomy of Melancholy.
We barbarians in turn have typecast the Chinese as inscrutable or wily, inventors of everything, but yet, more recently, as 'appalling old waxworks'.
It would be hard not be blinded by the dazzling brilliance and intellectual power of the current exhibition at the Royal Academy - China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795. Within a few years of Burton's book being published in 1621, Oliver Cromwell temporarily overthrew the tradition of kingship.
In China, nearly three centuries of the Ming dynasty were about to be defeated by the Manchu tribes from northern regions beyond the Great Wall - the 'Here be barbarians' spaces of earlier maps.
The Qing dynasty was to rule from 1644 until the declaration of the republic in 1911. The golden age of that dynasty covered the reigns of three early rulers; father, son and grandson - the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors.
During this period, the Qing trebled the size of their empire to more than 4 million square miles. The peoples under their sway, nearly 60 ethnic kingdoms, were double those of Europe and Russia.
Their emperors used their military and political powers, allied with art and literature, to impose authority over domains that stretched from Manchuria and the plains of Mongolia to southern China, from the deserts and mountains of Tibet and inner Asia to the eastern trading ports of the China Sea.
The Qing saw themselves as the natural successors of the oldest continuous civilisation in the world, and as administrators of a centralised state that had existed since 221BC. For the Chinese, the emperor ruled the world - his power was over 'tian xia' ('everything under heaven').
The exhibition is spectacular on a range of levels. We can wonder at the artistry of Chinese craftsmen and gasp at the scope and splendour of court life.
At a deeper level, it is fascinating how successive emperors sought to reconcile their Manchu heritage with the educated Han elite of old China. If nothing else, the exhibition is a case study for government spin-doctors.
The galleries of the Royal Academy have their own high-ceilinged imperial grandeur. In the first dimly lit room, visitors are confronted by large ritual portraits of the three emperors, seated on dragon thrones and dressed in ceremonial robes of embroidered yellow silk. Their poses are identical, but these are clearly portraits of real men. Rare court robes, lacquer screens and thrones surround them.
In the next gallery, wall-hangings and long scrolls delineate life in the Forbidden City and the extensive journeys undertaken by the emperor and his court to consolidate territory. Further scrolls record the rulers' birthday celebrations, or reveal their private lives as aesthetes, scholars, sportsmen, philosophers and artists.
The original belief system of the Manchu was shamanism. Religious artefacts show how this was tempered by Confucian principles and practised alongside Buddhism and Daoism. The Qing emperors' use of varying rites and traditions enabled them to rule their vast empire without unduly alienating adherents of different faiths.
The next three rooms are dedicated to the lives and possessions of each man. Despite their declared disdain of most things foreign, they encouraged scholars, craftsmen and artists to their courts.
Notable among these was the Italian Giuseppe Castiglione, renamed Lang Shining, who developed a hybrid-style of painting, allying western perspective to traditional flat Chinese decorative subjects. His portraits are seductive.
More fascinating still, are seemingly everyday objects. Much craftsmanship was reserved for the paraphernalia of calligraphy. All three emperors practised and took pleasure in this art.
The Qianlong emperor is credited with having composed and decorated 30,000 poems. He assembled and catalogued the largest art collection in history.
The excellence of simple ink, brush and water pots, and the intricacy of brush rests, took my breath away. The peach bloom vases, boxes and pots are highly covetable. Even more so are the simple exquisite white brush pot and wrist rest painted with bamboo and a poem.
A further gallery is devoted to the work of the 'literati' - traditionalists opposed to what they saw as the excessive vulgarity of the Manchu emperors. Subtle paintings in black ink on white paper evoke simple scenes of rural life; rivers, birds, flowers and insects, drawn with an affectionate wit that crosses centuries.
Ants skitter across a page, tadpoles and a crayfish dance in a stream, a centipede encircles a branch while a goggle-eyed dragonfly confronts the viewer.
The exhibition is a great coup for the Royal Academy, and the scholars, curators and sponsors who persuaded the Chinese authorities to part with such rare treasures. Most are from the Palace Museum in Beijing, some 400 from its holdings of more than a million artefacts. Few have been seen before, either in Europe or in China itself.
Reading the pre-publicity, I was disappointed that so few things would be on show. Having visited the exhibition three times, I now admire the reticence of the designers and the curators, Jessica Rawson, Alfreda Murck, Regina Krahl, Hiromi Kinoshita and Cecilia Treves.
More objects would be too many. This is a beautifully constructed exhibition with a simple narrative and thematic style. It has space, which gives the visitor time to look and to think.
It is well worth the considerable money spent on it. It ranks in my mind with the Tutankhamun and Pompeii exhibitions of previous years. Anybody associated with museums should make a beeline to Piccadilly. We, the one-eyed, have much to learn, not least from the superb catalogue.
These are ironic times. At the opening of the exhibition, Hu Jintao, the Chinese premier, posed with the Queen in a sombre, tailored Armani-style suit in front of the sumptuous dragon robes of his predecessors.
He returned home to be lectured by President George Bush on the economic benefits of democracy and free trade. I wonder if he paused to consider the response of the Qianlong emperor to the representative of George III in 1793.
'Reassure your sovereign. I need nothing from him; he and his allies need fear nothing - as long as they remain loyal tributary states of the Chinese empire.'
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Main funder: Goldman Sachs
Exhibition design: Ivor Heal Ltd
Graphic design: Tim Harvey
Exhibition ends 17 April 2006
'The Chinese say that we Europeans have one eye, they themselves two, all the world else is blind,' wrote the 17th-century scholar Robert Burton in his book The Anatomy of Melancholy.
We barbarians in turn have typecast the Chinese as inscrutable or wily, inventors of everything, but yet, more recently, as 'appalling old waxworks'.
It would be hard not be blinded by the dazzling brilliance and intellectual power of the current exhibition at the Royal Academy - China: The Three Emperors, 1662-1795. Within a few years of Burton's book being published in 1621, Oliver Cromwell temporarily overthrew the tradition of kingship.
In China, nearly three centuries of the Ming dynasty were about to be defeated by the Manchu tribes from northern regions beyond the Great Wall - the 'Here be barbarians' spaces of earlier maps.
The Qing dynasty was to rule from 1644 until the declaration of the republic in 1911. The golden age of that dynasty covered the reigns of three early rulers; father, son and grandson - the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors.
During this period, the Qing trebled the size of their empire to more than 4 million square miles. The peoples under their sway, nearly 60 ethnic kingdoms, were double those of Europe and Russia.
Their emperors used their military and political powers, allied with art and literature, to impose authority over domains that stretched from Manchuria and the plains of Mongolia to southern China, from the deserts and mountains of Tibet and inner Asia to the eastern trading ports of the China Sea.
The Qing saw themselves as the natural successors of the oldest continuous civilisation in the world, and as administrators of a centralised state that had existed since 221BC. For the Chinese, the emperor ruled the world - his power was over 'tian xia' ('everything under heaven').
The exhibition is spectacular on a range of levels. We can wonder at the artistry of Chinese craftsmen and gasp at the scope and splendour of court life.
At a deeper level, it is fascinating how successive emperors sought to reconcile their Manchu heritage with the educated Han elite of old China. If nothing else, the exhibition is a case study for government spin-doctors.
The galleries of the Royal Academy have their own high-ceilinged imperial grandeur. In the first dimly lit room, visitors are confronted by large ritual portraits of the three emperors, seated on dragon thrones and dressed in ceremonial robes of embroidered yellow silk. Their poses are identical, but these are clearly portraits of real men. Rare court robes, lacquer screens and thrones surround them.
In the next gallery, wall-hangings and long scrolls delineate life in the Forbidden City and the extensive journeys undertaken by the emperor and his court to consolidate territory. Further scrolls record the rulers' birthday celebrations, or reveal their private lives as aesthetes, scholars, sportsmen, philosophers and artists.
The original belief system of the Manchu was shamanism. Religious artefacts show how this was tempered by Confucian principles and practised alongside Buddhism and Daoism. The Qing emperors' use of varying rites and traditions enabled them to rule their vast empire without unduly alienating adherents of different faiths.
The next three rooms are dedicated to the lives and possessions of each man. Despite their declared disdain of most things foreign, they encouraged scholars, craftsmen and artists to their courts.
Notable among these was the Italian Giuseppe Castiglione, renamed Lang Shining, who developed a hybrid-style of painting, allying western perspective to traditional flat Chinese decorative subjects. His portraits are seductive.
More fascinating still, are seemingly everyday objects. Much craftsmanship was reserved for the paraphernalia of calligraphy. All three emperors practised and took pleasure in this art.
The Qianlong emperor is credited with having composed and decorated 30,000 poems. He assembled and catalogued the largest art collection in history.
The excellence of simple ink, brush and water pots, and the intricacy of brush rests, took my breath away. The peach bloom vases, boxes and pots are highly covetable. Even more so are the simple exquisite white brush pot and wrist rest painted with bamboo and a poem.
A further gallery is devoted to the work of the 'literati' - traditionalists opposed to what they saw as the excessive vulgarity of the Manchu emperors. Subtle paintings in black ink on white paper evoke simple scenes of rural life; rivers, birds, flowers and insects, drawn with an affectionate wit that crosses centuries.
Ants skitter across a page, tadpoles and a crayfish dance in a stream, a centipede encircles a branch while a goggle-eyed dragonfly confronts the viewer.
The exhibition is a great coup for the Royal Academy, and the scholars, curators and sponsors who persuaded the Chinese authorities to part with such rare treasures. Most are from the Palace Museum in Beijing, some 400 from its holdings of more than a million artefacts. Few have been seen before, either in Europe or in China itself.
Reading the pre-publicity, I was disappointed that so few things would be on show. Having visited the exhibition three times, I now admire the reticence of the designers and the curators, Jessica Rawson, Alfreda Murck, Regina Krahl, Hiromi Kinoshita and Cecilia Treves.
More objects would be too many. This is a beautifully constructed exhibition with a simple narrative and thematic style. It has space, which gives the visitor time to look and to think.
It is well worth the considerable money spent on it. It ranks in my mind with the Tutankhamun and Pompeii exhibitions of previous years. Anybody associated with museums should make a beeline to Piccadilly. We, the one-eyed, have much to learn, not least from the superb catalogue.
These are ironic times. At the opening of the exhibition, Hu Jintao, the Chinese premier, posed with the Queen in a sombre, tailored Armani-style suit in front of the sumptuous dragon robes of his predecessors.
He returned home to be lectured by President George Bush on the economic benefits of democracy and free trade. I wonder if he paused to consider the response of the Qianlong emperor to the representative of George III in 1793.
'Reassure your sovereign. I need nothing from him; he and his allies need fear nothing - as long as they remain loyal tributary states of the Chinese empire.'
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Main funder: Goldman Sachs
Exhibition design: Ivor Heal Ltd
Graphic design: Tim Harvey
Exhibition ends 17 April 2006
